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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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How does a small
town Texan become“America’s Best Theologian”? Hauerwas poses this question
at the beginning of his memoir, Hannah’s Child, and his
answer comes in some three hundred pages of entertaining stories that fill us
in on the characters and circumstances who influenced his thinking and writing.
Hauerwas is “famous” because he discovered that the Christian life is “an
unrelenting engagement with reality” (45) which makes it “so damned
interesting” (208). He discovered that Christians “have nothing to lose,” so we
“might as well tell the truth” (133) which led him to become a theologian who
“makes the connections necessary to articulate clearly what it means to say
that what we believe is true”(157). Hauerwas’s way of telling the truth has a
characteristic “critical edge”(186) that is often “profoundly comic” (58).

His theology is
unequivocally Christian, narrowly focused on the character of the individual
Christian who is shaped by the socially marginal community of the church. For
his provincial theological focus, James Gustafson, his doctoral dissertation
advisor, labeled Hauerwas a “sectarian, fideistic, tribalist” (208) and Time,
some years later, recognized his sweeping influence. The contrast is comic, but
not nearly as comic as when Hauerwas notes that this honor celebrating his
influence was announced in the 10 September 2001, issue of Time, ensuring
that it would go essentially unnoticed.

Hauerwas’s road to
success began when he became “Hannah’s child.” Hauerwas’s mother, long denied
and desperately wanting to be pregnant, remembered the biblical story of Hannah
praying to God for a son whom she promised to dedicate to God’s service. Being
a pious woman, Hauerwas’s mother prayed Hannah’s prayer, made Hannah’s
promises, but named her son Stanley not Samuel because, just before he was
born, she saw the movie Stanley and Livingston. So it was that before Stanley was born he was destined to resist liberalism for, as he sees it, if praying and
promising are real, autonomy is not. Liberalism’s assertion of autonomy as the
core human virtue makes no sense because it cannot explain why anyone would
keep a promise that proves costly to personal happiness. In the most touching
reflection of the memoir, Hauerwas recalls the pain of his parents when they
realized that due to their decision to dedicate their gifted son to God’s
service, he would enter a world they could neither understand nor share.
Nevertheless, Hauerwas recalls, “They let me go on; they let me enter a world
foreign to them, because they thought I was serving God.” And again he notes,
“my parents let me go” which was “a testimony to the truthfulness of their
lives” (44). From his parents Hauerwas learned that freedom is not the autonomy
to do as I will but the capacity to remain truthful especially when it is
personally costly.

Formation in
truthfulness continued for Hauerwas as a laborer on his father’s brick crew. By
separating liberal learning from manual labor, classical philosophy failed to
appreciate the truth Hauerwas’s father embodied; namely, “the superior good
that comes to those whose lives are honed by a craft” (40). In Hauerwas’s
insightful reflections on work, three aspects of the moral worth of work
emerge. First, to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, work teaches us that anything
worth doing is worth doing badly. That is to say, if there is a job that
needs doing, you get started and keep going rather than waiting for conducive
conditions. Why is Hauerwas so prolific? Why did he work so long at holding
together a marriage with a mentally unstable woman? Why is his conception of
the Christian life so free of the paralysis that comes of pitting faith against
works? One answer is that being a laborer taught him that “you have to get it
done before it rains” (86). The lesson learned from manual labor was, in a more
sophisticated way, repeated in his studies at Yale, with professors Hartt and
Holmer, who showed Hauerwas “that theology was best done as a form of practical
reason” (59). This means that we cannot be sure of the truthfulness (or
falseness) in our theological theorizing and believing unless and until it
becomes embodied in our lives. If nothing else, embodying our faith concretely
reveals our propensity for failure and the need for grace.

The second theological
insight gained from a craft is that anything worth doing badly is worth doing
better. Before Hauerwas read about Aristotle’s insight that we become better by
habit, he saw it embodied in his father who was “formed by years of ‘doing it
right’” (37). Third, we become better, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, not by
focusing on what we have done wrong but by knowing what to do next. Knowing
what to do next, be it in masonry or morals, requires a shared conception of
what it means to make progress. The edifice rescues the habitual laying of
brick after brick from tedium and allows criticism of bad work to be edifying,
even when it involves cursing.

Preaching, it was
thought, would be Hannah’s child’s work, so Hauerwas prepared for his labor by
reading widely, which led him to authors who caused him to wonder if “all this
Christianity stuff was not all it was cracked up to be” and to think that he
“might not want to be a Christian at all” (7). Hannah’s child, now an
unbelieving undergraduate, went to Southwestern University, where he prepared
for pastoral ministry under the tutelage of Professor John Score. Score, who
understood that the liberal arts were the best preparation for pastoral work,
started Hauerwas reading Plato, which gave theoretical support to the truth
Hauerwas already had learned at home; namely that knowledge and virtue are
intertwined so that being truthful “requires a lifelong transformation of the
self.” Hauerwas’s experience of pastoral formation through liberal education
ought to be normative. His life reflects an uncomplicated theory of education
which is captured in the admission, “I cannot separate what I think from who I
know” (196). The truth is, as Gilbert Meilaender points out, a good liberal
arts education requires nothing more than the regular meeting of “a thoughtful
teacher well schooled in his discipline,” with “a genuinely interested student,”
around “important texts.” As for Score, when asked about his part in shaping
Hauerwas’s character, he said, “How could you be a mentor to a volcano” (234)?

As a first-year
professor at Augustana College, Hauerwas discovered that “Lutheran identity” had
a useful plasticity. By teaching students that they were “in some generalized
way Lutheran, which meant in some vague way that they thought they were
Christian,” their parents could be assured “that by sending their daughters to
Augustana they would not lose the virginity they had already lost in high
school” (77). For Hauerwas general and vague theology is boring. Theology
becomes interesting when it considers the things that make “no sense if the one
true God is not fully present in Jesus Christ” (283). If what Scripture says
about God is true, Christians will recognize that “our lives are contingent…
(and) out of our control,” and will conclude that if, at any time we think we
“rule the world,” it is a sure sign we are “in the grip of a deep delusion” (231).
Hauerwas gives examples of prosperous and politically connected Christians
being reminded (by him) that their wealth and influence are theologically
uninteresting because Jesus’ death and resurrection are not needed to explain
why people are attracted to money or power.

Truthfulness requires
residence in a community where “Bullshit (is) not allowed”(45). For Hauerwas,
these communities have been the bourgeois family, the church, and the
university. Hauerwas has been mostly critical of the bourgeois family; however,
to be truthful, he had to acknowledge his debt to the stability of his parent’s
marriage and the benefits of growing up in a home ordered to faith and work.
His rich relationship with his son is something every father would desire, and
he shows how his struggles to keep a troubled marriage together now fuel his
deep satisfaction in his second marriage. While Hauerwas’s writings have given
us “a fresh way to think about the church” (250), his particular church
experiences have little importance in his memoir. This seems to be less the
hazard of being, in his words, a high–church Mennonite, and more reflective of
the importance of the university in his life and especially the conflicts which
have helped him better understand what it means for a university community to
be truthful and how the university and church relate.

As I noted, Hauerwas’s
educational ideal is summarized in his admission, “I cannot separate what I
think from who I know” (196). What liberal learning requires is not the impersonal
or disembodied dissemination of information. At its best, liberal learning
approximates an apprenticeship in thinking—the kind Hauerwas had with John
Score—which involves conversation between master and pupil over important
texts. But Hauerwas’s idea of the university is rivaled by the practicality of
bureaucratic managers, disguised in academic garb. The chief villain is Dennis
Campbell, the former Dean of the Duke Divinity School, whom, notes Hauerwas,
lacked the academic credentials to attain a faculty position but had the “one
great skill” of knowing “how to live among powerful and important people”(192).
And, admits Hauerwas, when his vision of the university came up against
bureaucratic methods, Campbell always was able to “outmaneuver people like me.”

I’ll not spoil the fun by disclosing any
more of these interesting conflict passages. Rather, I mention the bureaucratic
manager because it resonates with the not–so–faint overtones of Alasdair
MacIntyre’s work. One of MacIntyre’s main achievements, accomplished over the
span of a decade, was to map out how communities which are not ordered by truth
must be ordered by some or another form of power. Three of his books, After
Virtue(1981),Whose Justice, Which Rationality? (1988), andThree Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry(1990), constitute a
complex argument that arrives at the deceptively simple conclusion; we have
come to a moral impasse and must choose to follow Aquinas’s conception of the
truth or acceptNietzsche’s claim that only power matters. Nietzsche thought
that accepting power meant being ruled by a class of supermen. MacIntyre shows
that what it means is being ruled by super managers who promise results.

Reading Hauerwas’s
memoir was a sweet and sad reminder of how much time has passed since Hauerwas,
interpreting MacIntyre, gave many of us, “a fresh way to think about the
church” (250). When we first read MacIntyre’s reference to Christians at the
time of the fall of Rome forming communities of virtue and his appeal for a new
St. Benedict, we thought he was talking about the church. He wasn’t, but
Hauerwas was, and eventually MacIntyre would be too. So much time has passed
and so little has changed for either the church or the university. What has
changed for some is that we can now better appreciate the church’s dependence
on the liberal arts, and, as MacIntyre demonstrates in his recent book, God,
Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical
Tradition,how liberal learning depends upon Christian theology.

MacIntyre’s argument,
presented as a history, shows how the debate between revealed theological truth
and natural philosophical truth has shaped the conception of rationality that
has been crucial to our understanding of the university. At least it was until
around 1700, when a key momentum shift called modernity, enlightenment, or
secularism happened and thinkers began to take “the truth of atheism
for granted” (147). More and more religion was thought to lack “rational justification” (76), and
so one was either rational or religious. Religion maintained a
marginal place in the university so long as it echoed other academic
disciplines, but, on the whole, it was relegated to the personal and private.
Then, sometime at the end of the twentieth century, another momentum shift
happened, this time toward something called post–modernity in which every claim
of truth and rationality was considered a disguise of power. There is no such
thing as truth, which means the best we can strive for are results. It has taken
several centuries for this part of the story to play out, but now we can see
that by accepting the “modern” truth of atheism we swerved into the old mistake
of choosing to be successful over choosing to be good. (Who’s to say what
goodness is?)

MacIntyre’s narrow audience, the Catholic/Christian university, must come
to realize that there has been yet another—though very modest—momentum shift
that began with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum(1891) and gained its
most public exposure in the assertion of John Paul II’s papal encyclical, Fides
et Ratio (1998),
that reason and faith are not exclusive, but, says MacIntyre, that “Reason…
needs Christian faith, if it is to do its own work well” (152). Who could have
imagined one or two generations ago that the most important defenders of the
humanities curriculum would be the two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI? It
comes as no surprise to MacIntyre who persuasively shows that the energy
fueling the humanities has always come from an ongoing argument between the truths
of revealed theology and natural philosophy.

This connection was most
clearly articulated by Cardinal John Henry Newman in The Idea of the
University (1854). Here he stated that “The aim of a university education
is not to fit students for this or that particular profession or career… but to
cultivate “the perfection or virtue of intellect.” To be human means to pursue
the truth, which, in turn requires that we “engage fruitfully in conversation
and debate…” in order to obtain “insights and arguments from a variety of
disciplines to bear on particular complex issues.” A university education
cannot make us truthful. It can, however, teach students that to be open to the
truth we need the virtues of humility and patience and the linguistic skills
necessary for thinking. Having virtue and skill, we can enter into the
discussion focused on the “complex relationships between the myriad of
particular facts,” trusting that truth is discovered on the far side of
disagreement. This article of religious faith, grounded in the unity of the
rational creation, is nowhere more clearly expressed than when scholars express
themselves with the kind of clarity and coherence that makes their truth claims
“maximally vulnerable to refutation.”

The university that
arose in the thirteenth century was the result of an ongoing debate that began
with Augustine, who concluded that divine illumination was needed to preserve
the thinker from skepticism. This question was taken up by the philosopher
Boethius whose conception of the liberal arts was adopted by the medieval
university and who refused to judge between Plato, who believed that universal
truth and ultimate reality existed in forms apart from the physical world, and
Aristotle, who found truth within the world as we experience it. Boethius’s
unwillingness to take sides on this question ensured that the Hellenistic
debate over the relationship of ideas to the concrete world would be crucial to
the way Christian thinkers puzzle over what it means to be human in light of
God’s relationship to the world as Creator and Redeemer. From the perspective
of the Christian intellectual tradition, our thinking about what it means to be
human is defective unless it is open to the truths of both natural philosophy
and revealed theology. So, notes MacIntyre, it is “the task of philosophy… to
examine the nature of finite beings and
things, consider their causes, which rendered natural knowledge of God.” And
again, it is “the task of theology… to see how God related to finite things and
beings” (74). The conversation between natural and revealed truth, involving
characters like Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, and Pascal and conversations with
Islamic and Jewish thinkers, enables “us to identify accurately where the line
between faith and reason is to be drawn, something that cannot be done from the
standpoint of reason, but only from that of faith. Reason therefore needs
Christian faith, if it is to do its own work well” (152).

If Scripture reveals
truths we cannot know by other means, the separation of faith from learning
must result in confusion, particularly the confusion over the “relationship of
language to the world” (160). Elsewhere MacIntyre quotes Nietzsche’s aphorism,
“I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.”
Nietzsche rightly recognized that “belief in God is covertly present” in “the
structure of language.” The corollary is unavoidable; by accepting the truth of
atheism, it was inevitable that language studies (rhetoric, logic, dialectic),
the core of the humanities, would eventually come to seem unimportant. To be
sure, the philosophical prejudices of materialism and naturalism in the
university ably sustain the scientific and technological disciplines that yield
such impressive results. Moreover, there is no tension between this prejudice
and the professional programs that make the plausible claim that a good
education results in a good job. Nothing in MacIntyre’s argument
suggests that the restoration of the liberal arts requires the diminishment of
scientific or professional education. His argument is more subtle and more
disturbing. Failing to sustain a vibrant debate between revealed and
natural truth, Christian/Catholic universities will have succumbed to the old and bad
bargain of gaining the whole world and losing their soul.
MacIntyre has made it less easy for us to ignore the truth of how decisions
made today will either restore or destroy the soul of tomorrow’s Christian
university (63).

MacIntyre’s story shows
how the debate between theology and philosophy, that once defined and energized
the medieval university, can repeat its soul restoring work today. To take this
story seriously however means that we must recognize that merely adding a
patchwork of classes in ethics and sacred theology is insufficient to save the
soul of the Christian university. Two hundred years of eliminating the
transcendent dimension of faith from our intellectual habits is not overcome by
theological patches put on materialistic wineskins (63). Our hope, maybe our
only hope, is for the Christian family, church and university to create and
cultivate more Hannah’s children. Together, Hauerwas’s memoir and MacIntyre’s
history show what it means to both the church and university when Christians
recognize that we “have nothing to lose,” and so we “might as well tell the
truth”(133) in whatever academic discipline we work in.